Preface by
Progress Publishers

The first volume contains four works (New Economic Developments
In Peasant Life,
On the So-Called Market Question,
What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They
Fight the Social-Democrats,
The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in
Mr. Struve's Book)
written by V. I. Lenin in 1893-1894, at the outset of his
revolutionary activity, during the first years of the struggle to
establish a workers' revolutionary party in Russia.

In these works, which are directed against the Narodniks and
“legal Marxists," Lenin gives a Marxist analysis of Russia's
social and economic system at the close of the nineteenth century,
and formulates a number of programme principles and tasks for the
revolutionary struggle of the Russian proletariat.

The paper, On the So-Called Market Question, is included in
the fourth edition of V. I. Lenin's Collected Works: it did
not appear in earlier editions. Lenin wrote the paper in the autumn
of 1893. The manuscript was believed to be lost beyond recall and
was discovered only in 1937, when' it was published for the first
time.

Lenin's work What the “Friends of the People”
Are is published in the present edition according to a new copy
of the hectographed edition of 1894 which came into the possession
of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism only in 1936, and was not taken
account of in previous editions of the Works of
V. I. Lenin. The copy mentioned contains numerous editorial
corrections apparently introduced by Lenin when preparing to have
the book published abroad. All these corrections have been
introduced into the present edition. This edition, therefore,
contains the exact text of What the “Friends of the
People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats.